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THE REST PART 3

4

For the Chinese, the basic racket is too delicious and too ironical. They industrialize their country at the expense of the de-industrialization of the U.S. Not only is it sweet revenge for more than a hundred years of humiliation at the hands of Europeans and Americans, but also at the end they are relatively strong and the U.S. is relatively not. What do they care if the deal isn’t quite as good as it would be in a perfect world and they lose a third, half, two-thirds of their savings in U.S. Treasuries? Besides, in an even mildly less imperfect world, the U.S. President would not make such a blatantly corrupt bargain against the people of the U.S. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett calls this system of indebting U.S. citizens to foreign governments “a sharecropper’s society,” to distinguish it from Bush’s supposed “ownership society.”

No wonder Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan told a press interviewer at the time of the G-7 session in London in early February, “now is not the time” to revalue his currency, the yuan.[8] Of course it is not. He is clearly not stupid. The time to revalue is after China has sucked all the remaining jobs out of the U.S. that it can or just before the U.S. gets a less dishonest government. For the Japanese, the basic sweetness of the deal plus geopolitical strategic reasons may keep them tied to the U.S. There is also the spirit of J. Paul Getty’s famous line: “If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.” Some Japanese clearly think they have a problem. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on 11 March 2005 concerning his government’s U.S. dollar holdings, “I believe diversification is necessary.” This instantly shook the currency markets, causing the director of the Japanese finance ministry’s foreign exchange division, Mastatsugu Asakawa, to blurt out, “We have never thought about currency diversification.”[9]

Mr. Asakawa has been kept busy making this point. On 23 February 2005 he had already stated, “We have no plans to change the composition of currency holdings in the foreign reserves and we are not thinking about expanding our euro holdings.”[10] He added, “Valuation loss is not our primary concern. My opinion is that I don’t have to care seriously about that.”[11]

There are, of course, other major single party buyers of dollars and Treasuries besides the central banks of Japan and China. In fact Mr. Asakawa’s earlier remark was precipitated by a market panicking statement on 22 February from the Bank of Korea. They indicated they were considering diversifying some of their $200 billion in currency reserves, 70% of which were in dollars. The dollar plunged 1.2% against both the yen and the euro. Part of this was due to programmed trading which kicked in with sell orders after the dollar hit a threshold of $1.3210 to the euro.[12] After the dollar suddenly fell, South Korean officials quickly announced they wouldn’t sell any of their existing dollar reserves, leaving open the possibility of putting new reserves into other currencies.

South Korea, presumably, can be muscled. Other central banks are less susceptible to pressure. On 5 February 2005 Russia announced that it would no longer peg the ruble to the dollar, but instead to a shifting weighting of dollars and euros. Russia had been selling dollars and buying euros since October 2004, during which time the U.S. dollar had tumbled significantly against the euro.[13] This of course corresponded to the period when Bush was seen to be back in power for another four years.

The overwhelming consensus of financial writers was that both the dollar and Treasuries would really hit the skids in the new year, 2005. The consensus was global. For example, the French financial paper, Les Echos wrote in its edition of 21-22 January: “Until now, it was a question of the great bet adopted nearly unanimously by foreign exchange traders—the dollar will fall in 2005.”[14]

Of course, as implied by the quote, the dollar did not fall. Nor, of course, did its fat twin, U.S. Treasuries, which are little more than interest paying dollars. Is this because the trade deficit improved? Not really, although it showed a slight gain in early February, long after the dollar and Treasuries had materially improved. The dollar had gone up 3.6% from 1 January 2005 until 22 February 2005. Why? Did Bush raise taxes, thereby erasing some of the fiscal deficit? Not at all. On the contrary, he cut taxes—as usual for a select group—and that’s why the dollar rebounded.Plunge Protection’s New Cash

In late October 2004, the U.S. public was looking the other way when the tax cut was passed. Most people were obsessing over who would win the presidential election. Few were paying much attention to what the Republicans in Congress were doing, which was giving billions in tax cuts to U.S. corporations which had profits parked in tax havens around the world, such as in Ireland or Singapore. Bush signed the law enabling this tax giveaway on 22 October 2004. The tax changes were noted by a few at the time, even before the law changed. But the general level of financial journalism is so bad that they got no real echo in the press. Most people speculating against the dollar had no idea they were about to get stung. Obviously a few knew what the implications of the tax law were. They made out, more or less literally, like bandits. But one cannot legitimately claim insider trading since the tax law changes were publicly available knowledge, and even made it to the internet on various accountant websites in October. But they don’t seem to have gone much beyond these specialists. On 15 January 2005, I had a long talk in Paris with a top European stock market guru. Well connected and with a devoted following which he obviously did not want to burn, he had in all sincerity advocated buying gold to a gathering of thousands of his devotees a couple of months earlier, in November, after the passage of the U.S. tax law.

Most speculators were caught unaware on this source of currency pumping money, so it is unreasonable to assume that there will not be other surprises, which will be announced in due course.

The law Bush signed in late October 2004 goes by the obscenely false name, the American Jobs Creation Act. If there is one thing it will not do is to create jobs. It will instead create takeovers, which nearly always produce losses in jobs—in the name of synergy. Takeovers are on the limited menu of activities companies are permitted to do with the money they can “repatriate” under this law. Not that the limited menu makes much difference, since the money brought in does not have to be fenced off in any way. So if $10 billion were spent by a company on takeovers, that frees up another $10 billion to do whatever was prohibited under the law, such as paying dividends, buying back stock, or filling the pockets of executives with extra bonuses. Normally such profits earned in foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies would be subject to a tax rate of 35% if they were brought home, which is why the money had stayed parked in the tax havens. But the law gives companies a one-year window for the “repatriation” of this cash at a tax rate of only 5.25%. Nobody knows how much will be brought in. When the law was passed in October, the general expectation reportedly was that the figure would be about $135 billion.[15] But one player has estimated it at $319 billion. “This has some investment bankers salivating,” wrote David Wells in the Financial Times.[16] But how much would be converted into dollars from other currencies? According to two different investment banks, the figure is somewhere around $100 billion.[17] That would be the minimum available from this source to pump the dollar for one year. Recall that the Exchange Stabilization Fund has less than half that for eternity.

The Bush administration’s use of repatriated foreign profits to pump domestic markets shows that they are not going to let “thin ice” signs stifle their version of the economy, at least not without a fight. However, the underlying weakness of the economy because of the twin deficits remains, so basically all that Bush and his Plunge Protection team are doing is moving the “thin ice” sign out onto thinner and thinner ice. The weight of the Bush team will eventually crash through that ice into exceedingly cold water.